The Maggots Underneath the Porch

By Patrick James Ryan

Jimmy Turner is terrified. Very frightening things are happening in the neighborhood and he can’t figure out why. The Maggots Underneath the Porch is a powerful coming-of-age novella circa 1975. In the midst of a mid-West group of teens who are collecting baseball cards and beer cans, experiencing the cultural impact of JAWS, playing little league baseball, blasting guitar God rock music on ghetto blasters, a ravenous abomination is about to unleash death and mayhem on their unsuspecting rural community! Will any of them survive? And how many in the town will become victims before its carnage can be stopped? Beware the lurking danger that festered and formed amidst the rotting filth of The Maggots Underneath the Porch!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Bed Sheet Books
• Release date: Aug 17, 2017

Patrick James Ryan

Patrick Ryan grew up in Columbus, Ohio and started writing after graduating from college with a Bachelors Degree in Communications and Marketing. After marrying Molly and living vicariously through the sports and activities of their children ~ Colleen, Michael and Patrick ~ while balancing work in the financial services industry, Patrick recently reignited his writing passion in earnest cranking out Blood Verse in a little over a year while working on two novels and a second short story collection at present. An avid sports and music fan, Patrick enjoys Football, Basketball, Baseball, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and hard rock. In addition to writing, Patrick is a voracious reader, taking in an eclectic swath of fiction and non-fiction across many genres, with horror being a favorite. A practitioner of martial arts for over 25 years, he holds a second degree black belt and is a huge fan of Bruce Lee.

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The Maggots Underneath the Porch

Patrick James Ryan

The Maggots Underneath the Porch

A Black Bed Sheet/Diverse Media Book

August 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Patrick James Ryan

All rights reserved.

Cover art/design by Nicholas Grabowsky

Copyright © 2017 Black Bed Sheet Books

The selections in this book are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951744

ISBN-10: 1-946874-06-X

ISBN-13: 978-1-946874-06-1

The Maggots Underneath the Porch

A Black Bed Sheet/Diverse Media Book

Antelope, CA

Dedication:

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of Jim Birch.

The Maggots Underneath the Porch

Patrick James Ryan

Prologue

Summer 1974

The large freighter cruised at eighteen knots through the Atlantic Ocean en route from Malindi, Kenya to the Port of Charleston in South Carolina, returning from a humanitarian aid mission to the famine-stricken country of Ethiopia. The mission delivered enough food to sustain twelve villages for six months, but if rain and living conditions did not improve soon, the effort would be tantamount to putting a small Band-aid on a hemorrhaging jugular vein.

Deep in the bowels of the ship lie four crates of spoiled meat. Organizers decided not to unload, nor even attempt to dispose of the rotten meat on sight for fear that villagers would find it, eat it, and become ill.

The six-week-old chicken and ground beef evolved into fetid-decayed chunks of rotten-bloated decaying flesh, loaded with virulent strains of bacteria and disease. Several dead rats chewed through the wood to access the soiled dead flesh, only to succumb to traps set by crewman.

American houseflies that crossed the ocean with the ship buzzed around the dead vermin, laying eggs on the supple flesh of the dead rats, and nibbling on the rotten meat in the cargo crates.

Lying up on a wooden plank in the right corner of the cargo hold was a more dangerous cousin to its American counterpart. A male Tsetse fly, slightly larger than your average American horsefly, and one of the most dangerous flies in the world, watched the feasting going on thirty feet below where it rested. Double the size of its American counterpart, it had copulated with several of its female cousins and fed well on the abundant meat below.

Maggots infested the dead rats, competing for morsels of tissue, and losing, shoved aside by a larger, more aggressive hybrid larva of its kind.

Weeks later, when the ship docked, a couple of crew men were removing the smelly crates and reported being bit by some relentless horseflies. A few of the overly-aggressive flies survived and flew to surrounding communities to continue to breed with their American brethren across the country….

Chapter One

July 1975

The great swarm moved in and out of the miasma of waste, filth, decaying food, and dead animals like a slow receding wave flowing over sand and shells on a beach. Combining a unique drive for individual survival with a collective herd mentality, they are warriors of the wastelands, Da Vincis of decomposition, and unrivaled stewards of scum. Scientifically they are called Diptera. Entomologically they are larvae, and to most people they are the scorned and reviled maggot.

Thousands of squirming maggots weaved through a large pile of rotting food and dead animals next to an even higher adjacent pile of human feces and urine. Dozens of the white horde moved through the exposed rib cage of an Opossum searching for tasty morsels of dead tissue. Their tiny jaws chomped and devoured the dead flesh. Two days ago, the animal was hit by a car and fled under the house to die. By tomorrow, the lumbering marsupial’s body would be reduced to bones, picked clean by the swarm.

Dozens of flies flew in and around the mountain of waste, hatching new young to join the ever stirring-mobile horde, starting the life cycle over again in a setting that had progressively evolved into a veritable maggot five-star resort. The flies were also drawn to a separate smell, a secondary attraction above the porch that grew more prominent every day, a strong foul-sour-moldy-urine stench that signaled not only the potential for more food, but also another possible location to hatch eggs. Several dozen flew out from under the porch, honing in on the sickly smell above. Flying through cracks and gaps in window and door screens, those that survived spider webs and avoided injury discovered a bountiful treat.

Chapter Two

The enormously large woman shifted her copious girth in the over-taxed Lazy Boy chair. If the chair was not an inanimate object and could have screamed, it would have unleashed a tapestry of protests against the mass of lumpy flesh assaulting its fabric and frame. A long-low noise like car tires going over rumble strips could be heard grinding inside the woman’s stomach. The woman’s peristalsis muscles moved again deep in her bowels, shifting a huge amount of fetid gas that seconds later sputtered from her rectum, sounding like a machine gun, and smelling like a foul, rotten chicken and black bean burrito. The sickly odor blended in with the sour unwashed body, stringy hair, and never-ending potpourri haze of urine and feces that hung in the room like a fog. Hundreds of flies buzzed around the quaint living room.

Something much more insidious shifted in the woman’s digestive system, a slow growing malignant mass that should not be present, and would cause unforeseen health consequences if left unattended. A sharp pain knifed through her stomach, making the overflowing jowls of her face wince in harmony with the passing discomfort. A belch burst forth, followed by a hunk of half-digested chicken mixed with harsh gastric juices, burning her throat. She strained to lean over and pull the lever to a plastic covering, opening a hole in the floor the diameter of a beach ball that led to the earth underneath the foundation of the house, and spat out the piece of chicken. Months of fast food wrappers, soda cans, steak and chicken bones and a mountain of human waste had passed through the hole in the floor the last three months due to the woman’s extreme immobility, attracting a variety of bugs, rats, raccoons, dogs, cats, and other wild animals.

The immense woman knew something was seriously wrong with her stomach, a sinister and nefarious presence she could not quite figure out, and worry had begun to grip her mind. Functionality and mobility were at an all-time low due to the extensive hulk of tissue covering her body in huge shards of fatty lumps like the creeping flow of volcanic lava. She had not walked for sixteen months and her appetite rivaled an elephant. The monumental difficulties of the excess flesh ruled her life for the past several years, making her a prisoner in her own body, but for the last three weeks the rumblings and pain endured by her stomach even surpassed the rudimentary